Josef Albers’s Manhattan, a mural that enlivened the lobby of New York’s Met Life (previously the Pan Am) Building from 1963 until its controversial removal in 2000, could make a triumphant return to the city. Possible sites include the World Trade Center Transit Hub, The Art Newspaper understands. Finding a suitable home for the work is not the only obstacle: the original mural is in a landfill site in Ohio.
— theartnewspaper.com

If the design, by the firm of Tippets Abbott McCarthy and Stratton, wasn’t as sophisticated as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal a few hundred yards away—surely one of the great buildings of its era, transportation hub or otherwise—the Pan Am terminal was the second-best piece of architecture at JFK, and in some ways it captured the feeling of the moment more directly.
— vanityfair.com

“A $100 million building cannot really be called cheap,” Ada Louise Huxtable, the celebrated architecture critic for The New York Times, wrote in 1963. “But Pan Am is a colossal collection of minimums.”
— NYT

Ginia Bellafante recently wrote an article marking this month's 50th anniversary of the completion of Park Avenue’s Pan Am Building, since renamed the MetLife Building. Although, initially the public/critical reception was primarily negative, today the building is one of the most... View full entry »